![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jan. 16th, 2006
I've been asked, so...
Jan. 16th, 2006 02:50 pmI've been asked about my impressions about the Alito hearings and nominee Alito himself, so here they are.
Barring a miracle, Judge Alito will be confirmed as Associate Justice to the Supreme Court. The hearings are all but meaningless. It will be a largely party-line vote and there will be no filibuster. The entire exercise from the Democratic side has been to stall, mostly in the hope that he would self-destruct or hand them a trivial way to rile people up a bunch. Being cowards, they will not attempt to raise the actual issues themselves; instead, they'll just let him roll on through once they're done posturing.
On the bench, Justice Alito will be an advocate for the powerful in general, and for essentially-unlimited executive power, in regards to the presidency, in particular. His base assumption is that people in positions of authority (be it via power or wealth) generally have good reasons for doing the things they do, and should be given great deference. He is, as I've said in comments elsewhere, as strongly for governmental power in the seat of the executive as Senator Kennedy is for governmental power in the seat of the legislature. He is an authority-conservative rather than a libertarian- or Goldwater conservative.
All this seems clear from his record, his history, and, for that matter, the testimony of many of his supporters. The fundamentalists have picked up on this strongly and have started preaching (that word is not an accident, not after Justice Sunday III) more openly about the need to be deferential to authority - it's a religious virtue; falling into line is part of being right with their god. It is my opinion that everybody involved knows all of this, but, as discussed above, nobody in the opposition is willing to fight it on the actual issues, because it's complicated and difficult and they're too afraid to do any damn thing about it.
Either that, or because they look forward to having that kind of power if they ever manage to retake the executive, something his supporters apparently have no conception can ever, ever happen. In this regard, they are fools.
Because Alito styles himself an incrementalist, it will most likely be that he will be the fifth anti-Roe v. Wade vote on a series of rulings compromising the integrity of the precedent before being the fifth (or sixth, if Bush gets to name another justice) voting to overturn it entirely. It is also possible that he would support an overturning at an early opportunity; he certainly did make a point of not ruling that out during the hearings, and the fundamentalists are working to set up the test cases now. (See previous Cultural Warfare Updates for details.)
His record on race and the rights of women should be considered a high-contrast warning flag. He was a member of an avowedly anti-women and anti-minourity Princeton alumni group for several years, Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), and put it on his resume. No, he wasn't an activist; no, he wasn't heavily involved; yes, he was a member and more than willing to use it to try to get a job. Saying he was in it just for the ROTC is like saying you only joined the Klan because you liked their position on silver coinage; I don't like it and I don't buy it. His judicial record gives no room for reassurance on women; it carries with it implicit support for the idea that women are less important, as people, than men.
I expect him to be very friendly to the fundamentalists on state support of religion, of course. I do not think he would go so far as many of them would like, and declare that "religion" in the first amendment really means "Christianity (and oh yeah, Jews are okay too)," and he will not be an activist supporting, say, state-sponsoured prayer in schools, but should the court lean that far via a series of precedents, I suspect he would be a fellow-traveller and vote to support. I hope that, like many non-fundamentalist authority-conservatives, he will oppose nonsense like Creationism and ID.
On any attempt to overturn Lawrence v. Texas, I honestly don't know; given that he is not at all strong on equal-protection issues, I have concerns, but for that case to be overturned so quickly strikes me as unlikely. (Hopefully, I am not wrong!) I would certainly not expect a pro-marriage-rights vote out of him, however - or really, a pro-any-rights ruling.
As important as these rights-of-queers-like-me issues are to me in particular, I'm honestly more concerned about his, in my view, radical support for essentially-unrestrained executive power. I don't like it; I don't think it's originalist in any way; I don't think it's conservative in any sort of limited-government sense. Unfortunately, those issues are exactly why he's there. His views of the rights of women are similarly disturbing; they're at a level that would, alone, trigger strong resistance to his confirmation in me. But his views on executive power are so unrestrained that they take precedence over everything else.
I just wish we had a party that would just get up there and say it.
Barring a miracle, Judge Alito will be confirmed as Associate Justice to the Supreme Court. The hearings are all but meaningless. It will be a largely party-line vote and there will be no filibuster. The entire exercise from the Democratic side has been to stall, mostly in the hope that he would self-destruct or hand them a trivial way to rile people up a bunch. Being cowards, they will not attempt to raise the actual issues themselves; instead, they'll just let him roll on through once they're done posturing.
On the bench, Justice Alito will be an advocate for the powerful in general, and for essentially-unlimited executive power, in regards to the presidency, in particular. His base assumption is that people in positions of authority (be it via power or wealth) generally have good reasons for doing the things they do, and should be given great deference. He is, as I've said in comments elsewhere, as strongly for governmental power in the seat of the executive as Senator Kennedy is for governmental power in the seat of the legislature. He is an authority-conservative rather than a libertarian- or Goldwater conservative.
All this seems clear from his record, his history, and, for that matter, the testimony of many of his supporters. The fundamentalists have picked up on this strongly and have started preaching (that word is not an accident, not after Justice Sunday III) more openly about the need to be deferential to authority - it's a religious virtue; falling into line is part of being right with their god. It is my opinion that everybody involved knows all of this, but, as discussed above, nobody in the opposition is willing to fight it on the actual issues, because it's complicated and difficult and they're too afraid to do any damn thing about it.
Either that, or because they look forward to having that kind of power if they ever manage to retake the executive, something his supporters apparently have no conception can ever, ever happen. In this regard, they are fools.
Because Alito styles himself an incrementalist, it will most likely be that he will be the fifth anti-Roe v. Wade vote on a series of rulings compromising the integrity of the precedent before being the fifth (or sixth, if Bush gets to name another justice) voting to overturn it entirely. It is also possible that he would support an overturning at an early opportunity; he certainly did make a point of not ruling that out during the hearings, and the fundamentalists are working to set up the test cases now. (See previous Cultural Warfare Updates for details.)
His record on race and the rights of women should be considered a high-contrast warning flag. He was a member of an avowedly anti-women and anti-minourity Princeton alumni group for several years, Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), and put it on his resume. No, he wasn't an activist; no, he wasn't heavily involved; yes, he was a member and more than willing to use it to try to get a job. Saying he was in it just for the ROTC is like saying you only joined the Klan because you liked their position on silver coinage; I don't like it and I don't buy it. His judicial record gives no room for reassurance on women; it carries with it implicit support for the idea that women are less important, as people, than men.
I expect him to be very friendly to the fundamentalists on state support of religion, of course. I do not think he would go so far as many of them would like, and declare that "religion" in the first amendment really means "Christianity (and oh yeah, Jews are okay too)," and he will not be an activist supporting, say, state-sponsoured prayer in schools, but should the court lean that far via a series of precedents, I suspect he would be a fellow-traveller and vote to support. I hope that, like many non-fundamentalist authority-conservatives, he will oppose nonsense like Creationism and ID.
On any attempt to overturn Lawrence v. Texas, I honestly don't know; given that he is not at all strong on equal-protection issues, I have concerns, but for that case to be overturned so quickly strikes me as unlikely. (Hopefully, I am not wrong!) I would certainly not expect a pro-marriage-rights vote out of him, however - or really, a pro-any-rights ruling.
As important as these rights-of-queers-like-me issues are to me in particular, I'm honestly more concerned about his, in my view, radical support for essentially-unrestrained executive power. I don't like it; I don't think it's originalist in any way; I don't think it's conservative in any sort of limited-government sense. Unfortunately, those issues are exactly why he's there. His views of the rights of women are similarly disturbing; they're at a level that would, alone, trigger strong resistance to his confirmation in me. But his views on executive power are so unrestrained that they take precedence over everything else.
I just wish we had a party that would just get up there and say it.
A change of pace
Jan. 16th, 2006 08:57 pmI post semi-regularly about peak oil issues, or, as I tend to think of it, high-density portable fuels issues. (I recommend, by the way, reading the Hirsch Report on oil production peak. It's online in various locations; since it was done for the government, it's public domain.) I don't mention very often some of the interesting technologies that may, in the medium to long term, prove very helpful.
This is an interesting possible technology addressing some of the issues issues of both CO2 and liquid fuels. It's no panacea, and I've no idea whether it really pencils out energywise, but the much higher yield per acre than biodiesel and the complete lack of competition with agricultural uses are certainly good hurdles to have cleared.
This is an interesting possible technology addressing some of the issues issues of both CO2 and liquid fuels. It's no panacea, and I've no idea whether it really pencils out energywise, but the much higher yield per acre than biodiesel and the complete lack of competition with agricultural uses are certainly good hurdles to have cleared.